Obama's Big Economy Speech: No Hope, No Change

President Obama’s campaign speech on the economy today was an utter disaster for him. It was a bromide of tired old arguments, pathetic blame-placing, and shopworn con tricks. And even liberals like Jonathan Alter had to admit that it was, overall, a dramatic failure.

He began where he always does: with blame. “We’ve been wrestling with these issues for a long time,” he said. “The problems we’re facing right now have been more than a decade in the making …. For more than a decade, it had become harder to find a job that paid the bills, harder to save, harder to retire, harder to keep up with rising costs of gas and health care and college tuitions.” Translation: Blame Bush.

The Blame Bush nonsense continued apace:

We were told that huge tax cuts, especially for the wealthiest Americans, would lead to faster job growth. We were told that fewer regulations, especially for big financial institutions and corporations, would bring about widespread prosperity. We were told that it was OK to put two wars on the nation’s credit card; that tax cuts would create a enough growth to pay for themselves.

Fact: huge tax cuts did lead to greater job growth. Bush oversaw 52 consecutive months of job growth under his watch, beginning in September 2003 and December 2007.

Fact: tax cuts did begin to pay for themselves. The deficit began to shrink under President Bush between 2005 and 2007 thanks to increased tax revenue generated from economic growth.

Fact: fewer regulations did create widespread prosperity. What led to the economic meltdown was government pressure on private institutions to make shoddy loans to subprime borrowers.

Finally, after all this absolute rubbish, Obama gets to his own plan. What is it? Cliches! Check out some of these wonky proposals:

-“I believe that you can’t bring down the debt without a strong and growing economy. And I believe you can’t have a strong and growing economy without a strong and growing middle class.” In fact, “middle class” is an Obama buzzword. It gets repeated over and over. What does this mean in terms of policy? Who knows?

-“The race I want us to win -- a race I know we can win -- is a race to the top. I see an America with the best-educated, best- trained workers in the world; an America with a commitment to research and development that is second to none, especially when it comes to new sources of energy and high-tech manufacturing.” So he’s proposing … that we not be dumb. Great idea! Too bad that Romney guy didn’t think of that.

-“I see a country that offers businesses the fastest, most reliable transportation and communications systems of anywhere on Earth.” So … a monorail?

-“I see a future where we pay down our deficit in a way that is balanced -- not by placing the entire burden on the middle class and the poor, but by cutting out programs we can’t afford and asking the wealthiest Americans to contribute their fair share.” Sounds like fun. So when’s Obama going to repeal Obamacare to make this happen?

-“That’s my vision for America: education, energy, innovation, infrastructure, and a tax code focused on American job creation and balanced deficit reduction.” There is not one word of this cliché-ridden sentence that Mitt Romney would contradict. And Obama offers this as his “vision.”

His vision truly is spending a lot of money. He wants more spending on education. He wants more spending on college loans. He wants more spending on green energy programs. He wants more spending on government jobs programs. He wants more spending … more spending … more spending.